Thursday, November 10, 2016

Belly of the Beast

By Sikivu Hutchinson

The text that my spouse got when the election
returns first started rolling in was an early harbinger of the brutal rout to
come.His friend “Ted”, a white former
union leader who’d been downsized a decade ago in his small town in northeastern
Pennsylvania, proclaimed that he was voting Trump. “Build the f---ing wall,” he
railed, invoking his veteran status and visceral disgust with “sanctuary cities”.

On election night, Ted and his ilk flipped the bird
to the nation, making good on the white nationalist rhetoric of 2009 when the
Tea Party barnstormed across Middle America exhorting the Obama administration
to take its “government hands off of [our] Medicare”. Trump’s epic reversal victory is a
vindication of that backlash and a stunning rebuke to the infamous “autopsy”
the GOP did after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to President Obama. The autopsy suggested that the GOP would need
to ramp down its dog whistle racism and snag more votes from people of color. Trump’s shock troops are using the autopsy
for toilet paper. Now that the
Republicans have locked down Congress, their post-2016 mantra will
be we-don’t-need-to pander to-ya’ll-token-minorities-to- get-over-anymore. And while you’re at it, get back on the
plantation.

The formidable Latino, Asian and African American
voting bloc that many had prophesied never materialized for this election.
Hillary Clinton’s towering negatives, coupled with the fait accompli aura her
candidacy assumed in the media, kept some people of color at home
feeling angry, disgruntled and taken for granted. According to early exit polls, “only 65% of Latinos supported her, while 29% cast
their votes for Trump”. In 2012, Obama won 71% of the Latino vote compared to
Romney’s 27%. More frightening
still, Trump succeeded in winning 8% of the African American vote, improving on
the 1% he was pulling in early estimates.
Blinded by the “inevitability” of demographics, many liberal and
progressive pundits simply assumed that the white nativist backlash was a
fringe resistance movement, the last desperate gasp of a Tea Party that fundamentally
defied modernity and common sense.

A recent L.A. Times article
on bullish Trump support among white steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, scene of
a popular Bruce Springsteen ode to the declining steel industry, highlighted how
deep and divisive white angst is in the so-called Heartland. Trump victories in
formerly blue states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin all reflected these
racialized class resentments. According
to a CNN survey,
a majority of white working class folk believe that their children will be
worse off in the future. They contend
that trade agreements have eroded U.S. jobs and that the government is shafting
them. Ironically enough, the poll also
indicated that this same bloc believes government should provide more
assistance to the (white) working class.
Most of these “hard working whites” (the ones Hillary Clinton tried so
hard to court with bigoted appeals in 2008) believe the government is already
doing too much for “minorities” at their expense.

If the coronation of Trump and Trumpism illustrate
nothing else, it’s that the left wing dream of interracial working class
solidarity will continue to be a delusion in the face of the “wages of
whiteness”. In this regard, the ghost of
the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in colonial Virginia (site of a near upset by Trump)
resonates in Trumpist propaganda about making America great again. Bacon’s Rebellion laid the groundwork for
white solidarity across class lines. This
multiracial uprising of poor whites and black indentured servants prompted the
Virginia landed gentry to confer poor whites with greater civil rights in order
to suppress a potential long term working class alliance against the white
elite. As historian Ira Berlin notes, the Virginia Assembly “enact(ed) laws
which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give power to white
independent farmers and land holders. We
see slavery and freedom being invented at the same moment.” For the majority of whites of all classes, white
supremacy will always be the most invaluable wage.

Trump’s shock troops, the GOP, and corporate Dems
are heirs to Bacon’s Rebellion. Far too
often, liberal-progressive whites seeking to forge coalitions based on workers’
rights disingenuously disregard this legacy and their own complicity in white
supremacy. As people of color organize against
the coming Trump regime’s mandate for increasing criminalization, mass deportations
and depletion of black and Latino wealth, the reinvigorated white working class
will continue to regard equity and justice as a zero sum game.